Comment by sunrunner

With the recent surge in mindshare around language models and generative AI in general, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is unique content and experiences that are either tailored to the consumer or are at least unique for that person in some way.

But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these activities essentially have two functions. The first is the thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around that, which only really works when some majority of the thing is known by everyone.

This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique experiences, except that these unique experiences are always unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.

Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is unique to a player and essentially unique across all players (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others about the specific events that happened in any single run because everyone understands them in the context of the game as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run' still works because other people know how rare the event or combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared experience but also unique.

Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game, so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing again, and unless you play for a long time you might never hear certain lines that other people will have heard.

As for your example about conversations going nowhere when there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is actually the primary function even if we think it's a secondary function.

Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps there's even a third function at play, which is that the the _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to experience (to connect over).